Love and Other Mythic Beasts

For nearly six months I've been writing, mostly subconsciously, nothing but songs that in some way reference myths, cryptids, Atlantis, ghosts, and general humbug. I'm not announcing this with any sense of dread or regret exactly....I guess I'm just saying it. But it's surprising how much my life -- or at least the way I look at things -- is streamed through this lens and how it actually kinda works. Invariably, I'm more interested in the mysteries of life than the answerable banalities.

Anyway, so yeah....I went busking tonight. In desperation. Yes, it's that time again, that wonderful time in which I have to scramble to make as much money as I can before I go home for two weeks where I can't make money. That sort of thing doesn't happen in Hendersonville, NC. But what does happen is fun, and that's not to be missed.

Someone told me tonight that I should make a CD. Thanks! I think it'd be a good idea as well. So hold tight. In addition to scrambling for dirty pennies, I'm also scrambling to record EVERYTHING I'VE WRITTEN EVER before I leave for home on Wednesday. I've only got a few things left, but I'd like to finish it all in honor of the coming new year.

I debuted a new song tonight about an aforementioned mystery, written for someone recently. Too quiet, though.

Just 'cos I'm a little obsessed right now, here's a great Keats snippet for anyone in the mood:

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
To thy high requiem become a sod.

-- Ode to a Nightingale, 1819

Nobody Said It Was Easy

Due to auditions this week, I'm slapping the 'ole lock on my guitar case and resting vocal chords for a while. But I let myself go out for one last hurrah tonight, which was well worth it, despite a bit of running around that occurred. The aforementioned Asian fiddle player was occupying 23rd St around 5:00 (I think he's doing this intentionally to make me desperate), so I hopped a train to the next available station: 59th Street. My old stompin' grounds! I played at 59th throughout....well, pretty much throughout this entire year until fall.

I'm not sure what it was....maybe there's a certain type of performance energy that 59th St patrons respond to better, one that I once knew how to harness. But that didn't happen tonight. I had forgotten just how freaking loud that station is, too. Another guitar player was waiting for me to give up the pitch, so I let him have it and figured I'd try 23rd St again, where, sure enough, the fiddler had retired and I was able to do pretty well.

Except for some guy telling me to play Coldplay. What?! What?! What do I look like? It even says on my sign "FOLK troubadour." I mean granted, it's kind of a joke and an excuse for me to use a fun word, and it's not like I only play folk....but COLDPLAY? This guy didn't even look like he would have enjoyed "The Scientist" or any other overrated selection. I think he was name-dropping Coldplay as much as I was word-dropping troubadour when I made my sign. But the difference is I didn't bark at somebody mid-song to mention the word "troubadour." I'm sure his girlfriend was very impressed that her sweetiekins could read band names off of music videos and repeat them in public.

Some other guy requested a Donovan song, but politely waited until I had finished the song I was playing. I did that. So there. See what happens when you ask nicely?

Addendum: Just so we're clear on this, I don't hate Coldplay. I've had my fair share of enjoyment from their music. I just don't fancy myself someone who covers that sort of thing (especially when I wasn't asking for requests), and I guarantee you all that the bloke in question thought that Coldplay meant snowball fight when he first heard of them in 2002.

One Poor Correspondent

Back from NC, and ready to make-a the mon-ey!!! Tonight was a pretty good outing, considering I was only busking for 2 hours. My sister and I are kinda obsessed with the America song "Sister Golden Hair," so I hastily learned it before leaping out into the wide world of free entertainment. If you don't know that song, you're seriously missing out....apparently the main riff was inspired by the one in George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" (an equally good song), but I can't hear it. It's total mudslinging on the part of some weirdo Wikipedia journalist who strangely has it in for one of the tamest 70s rock acts ever.

Tonight I got that super "on" feeling, like I didn't have to push or anything; I was just so happy to be performing and bringing music to people that I could just feel raw energy chortling through my veins. Yes, I know chortling means laughing. That's what it was doing.

I'm not the world's greatest guitar player, but I had a surprisingly decent solo on a cover I did of Eels' "Railroad Man" tonight. I'm not sure what it was....I played with Funk a bit over break, so I think that just got me in a jammy mood. Apparently, I got an elecxtric organ for my birthday over the summer, and completely forgot that I had it. When I came home the realization hit me like a ton of bricks and I basically didn't leave it for the first day of being home. My piano skills are far worse than those of any other instrument that I act like I can play, but Funk and I had a pretty decent jam session nonetheless. You gotta love a piano that can make its own reverb. Which is basically what an organ is.

Surprisingly, I miss home just as equally as I love being back in New York. They're like the most completely polar opposites, but I love them equally. Let's not even add Boston into this equation...But at the end of the day, I can't really busk very well at either of those choice locales, and since that's where the cash is coming from these days, New York will be just fine.

Puritanicalypso

No amazing busking stories tonight; I'm in North Carolina for the holiday, an area sorely lacking in subway stations. Nevertheless, my indefatigable comrade, David Funk, has once again assisted me in a creative endeavor.

I know that the throngs have been ravenous for some Rob Morrison tunage for free download. And I for one am sick of ye olde myspace song limit of 4. Thus, through Funk's wondersome website, Sheer Will Power 2, you can check out 11 original songs of mine, 7 of which have never been online in any form previously. I know. You haven't been this excited since the theatrical re-release of the original Star Wars Trilogy. But try to contain your joy, if you please.

You can check out all 11 songs here.(there's no link from the main site yet). That's right: they're all free! Do with them as you will. Listen to 'em. Sing along with 'em. Convert them into holograms somehow and entertain folks at parties with 'em. Also, I'm going to add some links to the songs on the handy-dandy index to the right of this and every entry for safe keeping.

This Thanksgiving, I wish to extend a kind-hearted salute to David Funk and his brigade of programming Java gerbils. Danke.

The Father Orb

I hustled out of my apartment around 4:00 today to try cramming in a few hours of busking before hustling off again to run box office for Laughing Liberally midtown. I'm heading home to NC tomorrow for T-giving, and am in dire need of money for the journey (I inevitably spend much more than I should when I'm with my friends back home...the guilt usually hits me about a week later when I question how badly I needed those RC Colas and honey sticks). Tonight wasn't bad, and should at least pay for my cab ride to LaGuardia tomorrow.

Throughout the 10 and a half month existence of this blog, I've written about everything from the perils of busking in the summer to the annoyances of drunken back-up singers. Busking is weird. And not many other people are going to unpack that for you, so it may as well be me. There is one strange nuance of busking that I don't think I've mentioned yet, however.

Tonight, right as a train arrived, a 20-something girl scurried over to my guitar case and dropped in a dollar. I paused in my singing (albeit, at an awkward point in the music) but continued strumming, and thanked her as she began to move toward the train. She bashfully said something to me that I didn't make out at first -- it seemed like maybe she was apologizing for stopping me, or something along those lines. I told her, "no, not at all!" Then about half a second later, as the sardine-can metal doors shut behind her, I realized that she had said, "you really sound good!" Ugh.

When people donate, I -- for some reason -- am reluctant to really stop what I'm doing to thank them for long. Part of the reason for this is that I think it would embarass them. It takes an odd kind of courage to give a busker a buck, and I don't want to call too much attention to someone kind enough to help me out by stopping the song and allowing them to start up a conversation with me. But sometimes people do want that. There have been a few instances in which I could tell that a donor wanted to talk to me about something after they'd plopped their money in. You can just tell; they hover a little. Usually it's in regards to a request or a question about who wrote the song I was playing. And I definitely don't mind talking with people.

It would be ill-advised to stop playing every time someone tosses me a dime only to stand quietly as they walk away from my case. Awkward. It would suck equally to not stop playing and miss out on meeting Scarlett Johanssen in disguise in the New York subway. Alas. No perfect solution. At any rate, consider this entry my apology to the nice young lady who complimented me only to get an incongruent reply.

Oh. Roy Orbison's been on my playlists a lot lately, so I finally attempted to play "Crying" tonight with modest success. It's hard stuff, but about as cathartic as it gets.

DS Hell

Maybe I make myself out to be a victim too much. Could be. I think people have OD'd on the whole "it's not my fault that I spilled the coffee on myself....it was too hot!" approach. In the same breath, I hate Verizon wireless and the mockery they have made of my obviously, previously pristine existence.

I went out busking last Friday for about 5 hours, by far the longest sitting (standing, more accurately) I've ever attempted. My voice got tender around the three-hour mark, prompting me to be extra careful which resulted in an artistic epiphany wherein I found the perfect, healthy amount of support that my voice needed within the acoustically-depraved 23rd Street Station. I encountered tons of amazing people while I was out, debuted my new song, "Bitten By a Brown Recluse," and managed to barely repeat any material at all. Oh, and I made mad green stamps.

There were many more interesting stories to tell of this epic night of anti-social, pro-free-music antics. But I've forgotten them. Because fucking Verizon wireless' DSL connection in my apartment went dead for the umpteenth time after it took a month for them to get off their asses and connect two wires together and install the thing in the first place. Thus, this blog took over a week to be published and my memories have faded into the mercurial sands of time, never to be retraced.

Thanks a bundle, V. Now millions of people will never be able to know what social and musical barriers were climactically broken and what performance hurdles were overcome and what artistic milestones and zeniths reached.

Pitooey!

Add-verse Conditions

Writing bulletin!

I'm now about half-way through tooling and retooling songs for what I'm foolhardy enough to consider my next album. As you may know, I have never released any album. That hasn't stopped me from making a double album, however. Even if it never sees the light of day, its existence alone is important simply because I can consider my current project, "my next album," making me sound pretty cool and seemingly confident in the realm of sticking music on a tape. We'll see.

Anyhow, in typical Rob Morrison fashion, I've ironed out most of the musical aspects of the album to a pretty definitive point. It's all written! But where are the lyrics?! Ack! That's right: I always put off writing lyrics. Call me crazy, lazy, or just plain bad at it; I'm not sure of the cause, but I'm pretty tentative about lyrics. Part of me loves to rewrite and revise, and the other part loves to quit milling over a song and hurry up and record it already! The latter typically wins. Only he doesn't really because I get noncommital about the whole thing around that time, and the song I'm working on is completed six months to a year later. Sheesh.

That's a habit I'm stomping from here on out. But there's a hidden danger to nixing that sense of censorship: I can't stop. I started writing a song last week that consisted of five verses and clocked in at 7 and a half minutes. A tad lengthy, yes. Tonight I unearthed my notebook to revise a couple lyrics, and voila: now it's eight verses and surely over 10 minutes. Yikes. No one writes songs that long. Well, they do, but probably not when they're trying to get signed to a folk-friendly label. Oh well. Better add another verse and an mellotron solo and hope that some Prog label will want me.

All was not quiet on the busking front this evening. In fact, it was downright rocking with good times. Some lady sang along with me to "Mr. Bojangles" and another patron told me it was the perfect song for the subways, citing that it brought back a lot of memories. As I mentioned several posts back, I love that song. It's an incredibly sincere slice of Americana that dates back a ways and has been covered by everybody who's anybody. That's right -- me included!

After a rendition of "Sad Eyed-Lady of the Lowlands" (talk about a long song), a guy walked up to me and proffered up a Scooby Doo lollipop. I was pretty content with that alone -- hey, if it puts off dinner for another hour or two, great! -- but he also donated some free insight. Apparently the lyric regarding "the kings of Tyrus with their convict list" was not a good idea to cite because in his words, "a lot of ex-cons live around here." I informed him that the author of the song was Dylan, and that I didn't play it with any intention of getting a rise out of a demographic that's more likely to shiv me with a payphone than quietly grumble as they board a subway car. He nodded and wished me good luck.

And that was the evening as it was.

Wheellock Quickdraw

It's on. A rumble. A knock-down, dragout skirmish spar destruction-o-rama beatfest. I might even go to the gym for this.

The last three times I've gone busking, I've either been forced to go to another station because this way-too-smiley asian guy playing a two-string fiddle is paying rent at the 23rd Street station he's there so often, or because a crazy drunken homeless lady takes up residence near me while accurately shrieking out the author of the song I'm playing, effectively frightening away anyone who actually wanted to contribute to my dinner fund (I mentioned her awhile ago, I think). Long story shot, I keep relocating to 28th Street. Which I don't like as much.

Tonight was not so bad, however. Despite being out for a brief time, I did all right, and I even managed to attract a fan! A nice woman skipped probably five trains just to stick around and listen to me...she even told me that I was very talented and that she couldn't believe how bad some of the people are on American Idol when there was someone like me in the subway! I was definitely flattered...I've had one or two people skip a train before (I say that as un-egotistically as possible), but this was a first. I'm grateful that it happened...I guess everyone has a day or two of self-doubt, and I'm smack in the middle of it. It's always nice to get a compliment.

But I'm still really pissed at that fiddle player and that drunk lady.

Jack-o-Lantern Heart

In a desperate attempt to capture a melody I heard in a recent dream, I've spent the last few weeks writing a new song that I just posted to my music page on myspace a few minutes ago. Check it out!

As for my Halloween plans as a busker, I thought I might as well make the full metamorphosis that I've been undergoing slowly and don the guise of Bob Dylan. I certainly know enough of his songs to make it through a three hour set. Unfortunately, I'm incredibly hungry and have decided to visit the grocery store instead. I hope 23rd St can get on without me.

Expect a bunch of new songs soon. I've been writing up a storm of (typically) unfinished lyrics, but now that I'm back from that Boston gig, I can really buckle down and finish 'em off.

Now go do yourself a favor and watch The Innocents. I don't care what anybody says; it's the scariest movie I've ever seen.

Though I only harvest song

The challenge for this week was to go busking every single night in hopes that I might raise some R 'n R money for this weekend's trip to Boston. Unfortunately, sleep and a number of unfortunates have derailed this plan slightly, but I picked it up again tonight in hopes of making a comeback worthy of any jaw-droppingly goregeous slow-clap sequence.

No such luck. As I've said before, people are sketchy late at night (myself included), and I was unable to get out to the tracks before 11 tonight, so I had to deal with them. Not a lot of cash to show for my troubles, but I did start out doing an all-original set including some newer songs that I've been working on. As soon as I figure out how to post them in some free, exciting manner on here, I will. For now, you'll just have to imagine a couple haunting chords and some lyrics that are probably too pretentious for their own good. What else is new?

I received a MTA pass from a passerby tonight. He said he didn't have any cash, but had a couple bucks on the card. I accepted it gratefully, mentioning that if there's one thing I always need to have in order to busk, it's a means of admission to the platform.

That is until jetpack busking gets a little more well-deserved attention. Ah, day of days!

Whose Cider You On, Anyway?

There's a job I'd like to have. Driving a subway. I'd get to see all sorts of crazy underground catacombs that I'd keep telling myself I'd one day explore and settle in, but ultimately never do more than shine a flashlight beam upon. I'd get to take out aggression on slow, unwitting commuters who are unfortunate enough to end up between the doors of my tyranny. And I'd probably get to see a lot of cool buskers if I was that driver in the middle, who probably shouldn't be called a driver since I don't think you can do that from the center car on a subway train. But far be it from me to say what the responsibilities of this position are. I just know it would be fun. Just looking around to make sure everyone's inside the Cool Train. And checking out the tunesy wares of someone such as myself. The other self. I mean...'cos I'm just imagining myself driving the train. But that imagined self would be watching my real self do selfy things.

Long story short, there actually are one or two drivers (or whatever) that I see on occasion who nod and bop along with my music, and even give me a nice little wave from time to time. One guy gave me the peace sign tonight (I'll assume it wasn't that "most-likely-an-urban-legend-but-in-Australia-this-means-up-yours" sign). I think that's right cool....these guys don't have to do anything at all in regards to me, and I'm glad they seem to be enjoying themselves and can give me encouragement through signage.

On the other hand, you don't gotta look all peeved at me. Some lady tonight gave me a look like I'd suddenly produced all the works of Chaucer by tugging them from my rectum and then had to sit down and explain to her who Chaucer was (I'm not trying to be mean, but you weren't there. Trust me. She has no clue who Chaucer is). Why the look? Sure, I'm not necessarily ushering people onto the train or cleaning up the station or otherwise benefiting your cause. But am I hindering it? Am I a musical remora attached to the soft underbelly of your infrastructure? Am I merely a penny-pinching planarian parasite perusing the plains of your putrid, petty, pancreatic plaza? I think not. So don't give me a look like you just sucked on an egg that was filled with lemon juice. Because if that happened, you should be giving that look to your grocer.

In other news, I've decided that when I grow up, I want to be like the cool guy tonight who hopped off the train, skipped over to my guitar case (his fine cashmere coat rippling behind him), to drop a stack of ones in, without even hearing me play. Definitely want to be like that. Some day. Right after I settle in to my new apartment in that subway catacomb.

Awktoeburr Boiz

When you want to talk on your cell phone, chances are you seek out the solitude of a nice, tranquil New York City subway station, right?

I didn't think so.

Well, some lady tonight did just that, and brough her two year old kid along for the joyride. She didn't seem to mind telling her boyfriend/husband/whoever over the phone that I was "some nobodeeee playing cowntry music and sanging and -- ow! I am naht in da mood for dis shit!" My temptation was to play a little louder -- after all, what did she expect? Trains were zooming all over the place. Well, mostly on the tracks. Anyway, I let it slide and she eventually retreated to an corner where my dastardly "cowntry" music couldn't offend her senses.

Not much else happened tonight...somebody told "God Bless You" when they made a donation tonight. I was touched at first, then thought that perhaps my singing voice resembled a sneeze. Or that I looked like a bum again.

I also failed to provide any of the requests of a certain donor. She asked if I knew any Bruce Springsteen, or a bevvy of 90s artists including Rob Thomas, Goo Goo Dolls, or Creed (shudder). And I couldn't think of a single song by any them! I like Springsteen, but the other requests were just never anything I'd considered learning before. I heard so much Creed in high school that I think I may be ready to give them a shot by the time I'm 50 something. But hopefully never. Still, I felt bad that my inner library of 90s music + Springsteen was failing miserably in public (although, to her discredit, she didn't seem to know who Oasis, Travis, or Radiohead were...how could she call herself a 90s fan?!?).

Later, I enjoyed some tasty sausage pizza (with requisite hot sauce) with my earnings. Busking's totally worth it if only for making obsolete my ATM card.

Acoustic Lightning

I realized just now that I have very little control over the type of music I write. Sure, I can cross out words and rearrange chords, but the type of song I've got rolling around in my ribs is going to come out one way or the other, like it or not. Okay, so maybe my songs have grown a lot since I wrote my first one way back in middle school. But then again, have they really? Sometimes when I listen to my old stuff, I think, "geez, I would never know how to write something like that now! It's so free and sprawling and sincere." In another few years, I may say the same thing about the song I was working on today.

If I've learned anything in my few years as an artist, actor, musician, writer....it's that sometimes you have to kinda forget what you've learned. It's great stuff to have and all, like a backbone. An outline. Discipline, structure. But in the end, what matters is creative drive and work ethic. I don't mean to slip into self-help mode here...I guess I'm just trying to talk myself through some of these realizations that I've had many a time, which will probably repeat their appearances in the future.

There's definitely a kind of song I'm after. An honest, woodsy folk song that has elements of true folk music (lyrics and ideas being passed down from one generation of singers to the next) as well as elements of my own personality and outlook on the world. None of that's easy, really. I'm tempted to say that my own viewpoint and take on things is the hardest to grab the reigns on because it's still developing...but then again, the folk element is equally daunting, because it could be so easily forced and tarnished. In the end -- the temporary one anyway -- I'm left with whatever spills out of my fingers and my mouth.

Meanwhile, I'm listening to sequencer-laced, synthesized songs by Tangerine Dream that call to mind crystal-grid mountains in a glistening computer world. Go figure.

Abs in the Night

Having recovered from typhoid or whatever cruelly unrelenting (and therefore, old world) ailment I contracted two weeks ago, I ventured out into the wonderful world of subways again last night.

It was a good night for money. I don't normally talk about that kinda thing on here, but man. It was good. And Lord knows I needed it. It was also a good night for some new songs; I busted out my new piece, "Son of Cain," and tried my hand at Dylan's 11-minute long epic, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (which I think I had previously mentioned was the sole member of an elite recent playlist of mine). All in all, good things happened.

I even had an audience. Sure, she was homeless, drunk, loud, and had an appearance that compelled me to believe she was a stand-in for that Pigeon Lady in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. But she was supportive! She banged on her corner of the bench with her bottle of liquor shrouded in brown paper so vehemently that it drove away potential donors to my fine cause. So maybe it wasn't that cool.

Finally resigning myself to the fact that she'd never leave (although her surprisingly comprehensive memory of the lyrics to "Rocky Raccoon" was interesting in its own way), I gave up and took the 1 train up just one stop to 28th Street. Ah, yes. FIT fashion students are always patrolling this area in search of some forlorn busker to whom they can give away a sizable morsel of their trust fund. Or so I tend to think. It didn't work out quite like this.

But it wasn't awful, either. I met a guy who books singer/songwriters for a coffee house at Columbia...he told me they're looking pretty full for the fall, but there'd be space in the spring. I thanked him, and he told me he'd get in touch with me via myspace. He was wearing a Dylan hoodie, so he seemed respectable enough.

As I was packing up, a suspicious dude started swaggering his way towards me at quite a pace. I say suspicious, because he seemed to be one of those homeless guys who has headphones on and is carrying a CD player that's yellow and was probably made in 1995, and it's my guess that even if this guy was able to find batteries for it, not even SONY made discmen that had such a notable longevity. Discmen suck, it's a well-known fact. Plus, he had a sleeveless flannel shirt on that was unbuttoned (similar to what I wore in The Full Monty, if any of you saw that) which exposed his (again) suspiciously well-toned abs, and black jeans. That's just not a good sign. So I tried to pack up quick in case he had some nefarious designs to steal my motherlode or deface my capo or something. Instead, the guy gave me a dollar bill. I thanked him, and he held out his fist for me to reciprocate. I fist-hit him (what do you call this? punching?) back, but apparently you're not supposed to do it with your left hand, a matter that he made sure to relay to me for correction. I got him back with my right. He tipped his grungy baseball cap and sauntered off into the night, his suspiciously rock-hard abs cutting the air as he walked.

Talk about abnormal.

An Extra-Special Trip to the Writer's Corner

Funny things used to happen when I got sick. Once, while watching TaleSpin under a haze of fever-induced euphoria, I convinced my mother that even though I hadn't been able to keep any food down in three days, I absolutely needed to eat hot dogs because Baloo was chowing down on some. I'm glad he didn't fly the Sea Duck into the Iron Vulture...I may have attempted to reenact it. Later on, when I got mono in high school, I had a serious craving for twinkies (even though my throat was lined with so many pods of pus it must have looked like those towers of plugged-in mindslaves in The Matrix). Okay, so apparently I just got obsessed with semi-odd food items when I got sick back then. But I also beat Final Fantasy VIII while I had mono. Maybe that's not so weird.

To make a long (and predictable) story short, I'm currently sick. And the only funny thing that's happening is this: because I'm sick and still in the midst of my Full Monty run, I can't risk busking. In short, I'm poor. Make that poor with a capital "P" and pronounced the way my music professor in college preferred (poo-wer). Oh...and being poor isn't so funny when your rent is due.

On the sunny side of my ailment is the opportunity to lay stranded in bed for about twenty hours a day. This is reclined position is of course famously known for being inclined to produce a creativity unparalleled in accomplishment and distinction. I'm pretty sure Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway while sprawled out supine. Copland couldn't have thought of all those crazy intervals while standing up, no sir. And what about the Sistine Chapel? Don't even try to tell me that Michelangelo was on a ladder or some scaffolding for that one!

In light of my inevitable location for any number of days, I've decided to get some writing done on a few songs I've been kicking around the proverbial batchee field. Writing is one of the weirdest things to me...in some ways it gets easier with every piece I finish, and in other ways it gets progressively harder. I tend to get pretty mad when I work on something and realize that it's already been done (most often by me), so the pressure to come up with something completely and utterly new is probably a contributing factor to my songwriter's block. But inspiration can come unexpectedly. I snapped my low E string the other day, leading me to say outloud, "well, great. Now I have to get up and find a replacement string. Otherwise it's gonna sound like it doesn't have any foundation." This "foundation" statement suddenly gave me an idea for a song, which I finished in nearly an hour, called "Son of Cain." It's certainly got some wannabe Dylan elements to it (inevitable, as I've been listening to "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" on repeat for about week), but I'm rather pleased with it, and hope to post in on myspace soon.

I love getting things out of the way. Sometimes I like to let songs stew in the 'ole crockpot in my head so that they come out as near to perfect as can be reasonably expected...but I think I do this way too often. I've got dozens and dozens of songs that I've recorded while drunk or intoxicatingly-inspired that were indeed preserved for posterity in their infant stages, but have never made it out of the nursery. Tons! A few weeks ago I got a little fed up with this and finally completed "Searching For Spring Hill", a song that I started about one year ago. It's up on the old myspace page now for your listening delight.

Finishing "Spring" and writing "Son of Cain" gave me a jolt of energy the other night and I stayed up till all hours brainstorming ideas for a completely new album from the one I've been (slowly) working on since January. I realized that I have about twelve songs or so that have the same general feel...a kind of pastoral, autumnal, eerie, colonial-era feel...and that my new task is to finish these up and record 'em for a new record. My last album (written, not released as of yet) was a double-album conceptual piece called Songs of Inexperience, based on the books of poetry Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake. It was pretty complicated stuff (for me, anyhow)...each song on the first CD linked up to a song on the second CD in terms of themes. But this untitled new album will just have a cohesive sense of season and feeling to it, not anything too ornate or out-there. It's actually very refreshing to think about writing it...I almost always make things too difficult for myself. We'll see how things turn out.

In Paul Zollo's interview with Dylan in Songwriters on Songwriting, the great troubadour said that to write songs (his way), he has to empty out all the "good" and "evil" thoughts in his head because they're just "baggage," and "don't mean anything." "Then you can do something from some kind of surveillance of the situation. You have some kind of place where you can see it but it can't affect you." The idea of entering that kind of dead zone is akin to the notion of learning how to breath properly by zeroing in on your breathing pattern to detect how you're doing things incorrectly without actually consciously changing what it is you're doing (part of the Linklater vocal training I had in college). I've been in that place before, but it's incredibly difficult to find. And once you've found it, it doesn't necessarily get easier to find again. You just gotta keep on trying. "Searching For Spring Hill" came out of that place, as did a handful of my other songs, like "Glassfish" and "Spill the Coffee." It's still not easy to do, though.

In the meanwhile, I'll keep brewing up these ideas of fever dreams, spider bites, jack-o-lantern hearts, wheat fields and hollow trees, and see where that gets me.

Thanks for stopping by the Writer's Corner, kiddies! Come back soon!

Ceptehmburr Gurlzzz

I have returned to the internet after what feels like ages.

One might think that this means I have oodles of yarns to spin on this blog.

Unfortunately, I don't.

I'm currently in a cosmically-significant production of The Full Monty at the Studio Playhouse in Upper Montclair, NJ, so my time hasn't been flowing quite as bountifully as my unemployed self is accustomed to. Come check out the show here. It's going to be a crazy good time. I mean, just look at the above photo. Any time people make that pose, you know your mind is about to be irreversibly blown. And besides: I know all you people who read my blog/see me playing in subway stations really just want to see what I got goin' on beneath my clothes. Now's your chance!

Oh, right. Busking. Let's see...I went out about three nights ago around midnight. Yeah, pretty late. But I was in the right mod for it, and had reconciled myself to the reality of not making a whole lot of money. It's interesting who you see late at night. I actually got quite an audience at the 23rd St Station. Not a large one, just an attentive one. Late at night I usually do all originals since I don't have to be as loud (I write a lot of fingerpicking type stuff that gets drowned out during busier hours), and the small group of tired commuters I found that night seemed to genuinely enjoy themselves. Sometimes I really have no clue if what I write works at all...sometimes all it takes is me finding enjoyment in playing the song, and that being strangely translated as talent to passersby. I don't know. This stuff is all a delightful mystery to me.

I almost had to go all Dirty Harry on a guy, though. Some bastard that works in the MTA booth barged out after I'd been playing for at least half an hour, to inform me that if I didn't have a permit, I'd have to high-tail it outta there. Now let me be clear about something. I've only ever had one run-in with the cops. It was fine; I just said I'd go home, then went right back to busking (in another station). Anyone who cares to thumb through these archives can remind me of when that was...I think June maybe. Anyhow, that was during rush hour, so I was not, at least, surprised that the confrontation occurred.

This was at 2:00 am. Two friggin' am! Who did this guy think he was? The only people in the station were me, a sleeping bum, and somebody's legs I could see from around the corner where they were sitting on a bench. I was basically playing for myself! Didn't matter to this Eisenstein. He threatened me with a call to the coppers. I stood up to this douche and told him that what I was doing was perfectly legal (again, this is true), and that he could call in the Navy SEALS for all I cared. Sure enough, he called. And, sure enough, no one came. Just as I suspected. What cop is going to make a pit stop at some god-forsaken MTA station to boot out a red-haired kid who's quietly plucking his guitar, lulling some poor homeless guy into a sleep that may result in an untimely yet inevitable death? NOBODY.

I still wished the MTA worker a good night when I left. What can I say? I didn't have any hand grenades on me.

A Voice From Beyond the Shadows of Corporeal Matter...

Yes, I am still here. I wasn't mugged in a subway station and tossed in front of an oncoming train. But it feels like I was.

I haven't had internet for sometime (I'm sneaking some right now), and have waited -- no joke -- three weeks for Verizon to get off its duff and install mine, since I paid for it and all. As I now know, that's far too much to expect from them.

Long story short, in two days I'll have the internet once more, and there will be legitimate postings here. Then again, they've told me all this before, so who knows.

The Obnoxious Back-Up Singer Meets the Back of My Hand

After returning from my first rehearsal for The Full Monty last night, I was feeling pretty pumped about the performance prospects of the production, so I put off going to bed and booked it out of my building to go busk (sorry...in an alliterative mood).

I wasn't out for long. By the time I cracked open my guitar case, set up, and started playing, about four trains had gone by, which is never a good sign because there wasn't much of an audience lingering in the station. Exacerbating the evening's outlook considerably was a large black man who decided to sing unrelated back-up vocals for "Heart of Gold" -- the first song I played! Unbelievably bad luck. His friends thought it was the funniest schtick they'd ever seen. Being a billowy, blubbery sort of fellow, his voice more than drowned out my own, and I was forced to wait it out until he amscrayed.

When their train arrived, the group shuffled over to it and the dude's friend goes, "C'mon, man, give him a dollar!" The dude just starts laughing and shakes his head. I couldn't believe it. I wanted to channel good 'ole El Kabong from that Hanna-Barbera cartoon and smash my guitar over his empty noggin, but remembering that I only have one guitar, I abandoned this option.

A minute later, I thought of a decent comeback. "No, tell him to keep his money. He needs it for voice lessons." Always too late.

An Inkling

Last night was a late one. Even without me watching The Legend of Boggy Creek until like 3 am. I usually busk until 8 or 9, but I've been feeling pretty liberated (read: poor) lately, mostly due to my lack of other jobbyness, so I stayed out until midnight.

I've encountered some pretty weird troglodyte-type characters in the nocturnal hours of Subwaydom (most of which are way scarier than those stupid things in The Descent), but this time around I was blessed with a pretty tranquil evening at 23rd Street.

A few new songs entered the mix, both substantial classics: "Lola" by the Kinks and the Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Feeling ballsy, I even tried playing the standard "Love Hurts" (Roy Orbison and Gram Parsons have covered it, among others), even though I had only an inkling of what the chord progression was. Turns out that inkling was a right inkling. It's kinda cool to know that I can more or less play a song after hearing it a couple times (providing it has a somewhat traditional chord structure). Remembering the lyrics, however, is a different matter altogether.

A lady asked for my contact info last night just before she hurriedly hopped a train. She tried shouting something as the doors closed, which very likely could have been, "I'm working on a movie and we needs songs for the soundtr--". Then again, maybe she was saying "I work for an insidious organization that shops people's phone numbers around to all sorts of terrible telemarketers and nefarious nogoodniks and dastardly do--". With my luck, it's probably the latter.

A-chording to Me.

To provide some contrast to my day-to-day posts, I figured I might spend some time answering a handful of questions people ask me from time to time about the daredevil realm of busking. Consider this entry an Official Busker's FAQ.

Do you get tired?
Ah, good 'ole fatigue. It's tiring to do anything for three hours at a time, but when there are sharp strings and soft fingers involved, fatigue tends to lead to a fair bit of abrasion and eventually some nasty strumming wounds. I'm often seen sporting some fashionable Rocko's Modern Life band-aids as a result. Maybe it gives me some indie cred or a streetwise appearance. Probably not, unless it's still 1996.

Don't people steal from you?
Yes, there's the ever-present danger of having someone steal from the veritable cornucopia of cash that is my beat-up guitar case (I should point out the intended sarcasm in that sentence so as to avoid any mistaken "cocky" labeling). I've actually never had a problem with this yet, but there have been a few instances when a couple of thuggy kids (it's aaaalways kids) have eyed my property and I had to go all Conan the Barbarian on them (because no one deserves Conan the Destroyer), which for me means puffing myself up like a blowfish and trying to look intimidating. For proof of the existence of God, I'd cite that this tactic of mine has miraculously worked and none of my earning have ever been ganked by a lowlife. Then again, maybe I just didn't see it happen.

What about your voice, dude?
Yeah, it's pretty rough singing nonstop for three hours or more while trains whizz around and people bark at each other and the smart ones just keep listening to their headphones in order to stay sane. There have been a few instances when my voice started feeling pretty ragged from being pushed too much, forcing me to call it a night. This past Friday evening, my voice completely bottomed out in the middle of "Eve of Destruction" (a P.F. Sloan tune that the Turtles covered). It wasn't a good feeling, and I've been resting my voice ever since (it's fine now). I went to school for musical theatre, so I know how to take care of my voice...sometimes I'm a bit too stubborn to take the proper measures.

Are you homeless? Can I like...give you food?
Yes, I'll totally take your food. I'm usually hungry. One kind lady gave me a water bottle the other day. No, I'm not homeless. Interestingly enough, one homeless fellow gave me a bag of chips once. I would have counted that as more of a favor if he hadn't already opened it and ate half of them.

Can I get change for a five from your money if I leave you the five?
This happens a lot, actually. Passersby would like to leave some money for me but only have a five dollar bill. It's fine and I let them change it out in my case. Sometimes I get weird looks from other folks who didn't see the whole transaction and must think the person is stealing from me and I'm just standing idly by. But whatev.

Do you take requests?
I can try to! I'm not quite up to human-Wikipedia skills yet, but I know a fair amount of bands and songs. And I like to make people happy. So go ahead and try me (if you want definite results, it's best to stick to Neil Young, the Beatles and Weezer).

Well, I think that's all for now, but I'll be happy to answer more questions in the future. Feel free to contact me through this blog if you have any other questions about the wide world of Busking.

Wild at Heart and Crazy on Top.

I was out for maybe 45 minutes last night until one of my strings broke. Replacing it would have been a cinch but I'd taken out my boxes of strings at home, searching them for a G and lamenting that I'd used all of them already. My current G string (for my guitar, thank you very much) is coming apart at almost every fret, and I was certain it would blow off and lash my face at any number of my outings lately. However, not to be figured out so easily, the Universe willed my D string to break instead.

On Tuesday night, a girl slipped the following note into my guitar case:

hi!
(I'm not a sketchball)
I saw you getting out your guitar with your harmonica around your neck and wondered if I'd be lucky enough to hear Dylan. Then it was the first song you played. (let's be friends?)

She included her name and e-mail address as well. I appreciate the note a lot because it seems like something I might do if I liked a street performer, and simultaneously didn't wish to be mistaken for a creep. I'm really afraid of that. I remember realizing one day in high school that someone who feels things as strongly as I do (in this case, it was love) tends to be regarded as a creepy person. And I didn't want that. At the same time, I don't really know how else I should do things. I guess it's nice to be so passionate all the time, but it gets less nice when you get labeled "crazy."

Not that I particularly care what people think. I used to wear polar bear pajamas and hawaiian shirts to school while singing along with the Devo songs playing in my blue Sony Discman that I'd outfitted with industrial strength velcro in order to attach the unit to the fuzzy ceiling of my 1989 Honda Civic so I could avoid track skipping on bumpy roads. In case you're wondering, it didn't work.

Nevertheless, I don't like the idea of being discredited. That's why I don't ever want to be an alcoholic, drug addicted, child molesting, fascist, hallucinator who's a fan of Gray's Anatomy: it totally discredits anything else you might have done. People won't trust you around their wines, medicine cabinets, children, flags, senses of reality, or television sets...and that's no good at all.

Things got so hot and stale in the 50th St Station last night that I very nearly passed out. I love how I can put off busking for days at a time when the weather's nice, but once the thermostat creeps up to the triple digits, I'm out strumming my stuff every other night. Take that, Global Warming!

Sweat.

So hot. Want to touch the heiney.

New York is gross right now. I, being my usual brain-a-tron self decided that such an environment might be ideal for busking. I'm sure I don't need to relate to you the details of what I discovered.

But I will. I think I'm becoming a manly man, in the sense that I sweat all the time, but unfortunately still don't have muscles or an imposing presence. I suppose I'll take what I can get. Subway stations are particularly bad places for sweat glands to be. Above ground, you can at least air out smothered areas of your body, and if you're lucky there might even be a stray gust of wind to refresh your heat-addled existence.

In Subwayland, there's nothing like that. Well, there is actually. With every roaring train comes a boiling maelstrom of engine exhaust that's very likely to strip away the flesh on your forehead if you're not cautious. Other than this unpleasantry, literally NO AIR MOVES in the subway stations of New York City.

Not a good thing. It sucks enough when I have to go off to my mindless office job or to gorge upon delicious milkshakes uptown. But these trips only require a ten-minute wait, tops. Imagine being in a station for, say, three hours. While strumming fast enough to fuel multiple strum-o-matic power plants. While singing with the efforts of a hundred men, women and children, none of which are strong enough to counter the fearsome thunder of incoming trains. While pressing an increasingly warming guitar body up against one's own, creating a wondersome jungle of steam, friction and discomfort. Then add in the part about a cockroach trying to stowaway in my guitar case, and you've pretty much recreated my typical Friday night.


Attention one and all: this entry has just received the coveted Cube-Side.com Golden Sticky award for Blog of the Week! Click on the sticky to check out all the knickknacks at Cube-Side.com! Thanks for your interest, everyone; keep reading and keep tipping!

Forgotten Glockenspiel

There's been an eminent lack of tips lately. I've always admitted to my pursuit of busking being purely for the purposes of catharsis, practice, and providing entertainment. But hey, the money's a plus. And it sucks when people are super stingy just because they're in a super bad mood as a result of every single summer blockbuster this year being a load of codswallop. (Even that might be generous for DaVinci Code).

Maybe it's the heat, the recent life woes, or the inevitable feeling of going through the motions....at any rate, I've been noticing that I'm trying almost too hard to get tips from people lately. This desperation is, of course, exacerbated by the fact that everyone seems to be as miserable as I am. I'm not going all-out with mugging for my "audience" or anything, but I've been doing this weird thing where I kinda close my eyes when I'm singing, as if I'm channeling the Great Spirit or something to prove how well I can emote in the 59th Street Station. I mean, I do close my eyes sometimes, but this is way overboard. Luckily, I have all the aforementioned excuses as well as the ultimate one: this heat is freaking disgusting. After checking out Gore's documentary, I'm half-tempted to shut off my computer right now and pretend that I can feel the world's overall temp increase by some infintessimally small percentage.

On the ever-present upside, I rediscovered my love for the ole classic song "Mr. Bojangles." I know tons of folks have covered it, but I'm principally familiar with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's version. For anyone not already familiar, "Mr. Bojangles" is a melancholy little 3/4 tune about a preternaturally-gifted dancer who tours the fairs and the like in the South, impressing people with his deft moves and impossibly high jumps. I remember my dad used to love the song, and the first time he played it for me (in the car going somewhere...Abu Dhabi perhaps) I got a little choked up in spite of myself when Mr. Bojangles explains that he made his dancing rounds with his dog for 15 years before the latter "up and died."

I've always been a little too sensitive for my own good.

As a side effect from this obsession with Mr. B, I've had a sharp stab of homesickness, probably because of the delicious chain of Bojangles fried chicken restaurants that are studded around my hometown in NC.

Don't think twice, it's all right.

I guess I don't think of my music as being all that cinematic or underscore-y, but the world seems to think otherwise.

My friend Jeb asked me to work on a soundtrack for a short film he was doing back in March. I expressed a little reservation because I simply don't write a whole lot of instrumental tunes, and certainly know next to nothing about the finer points of film scoring. Ultimately I gave it a shot because he was doing a western, and being such an idolizer of a healthy chunk of that genre, I'd always wanted to write my own version of "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" theme. The end result turned out halfway decent. (It's on my myspace page as "The Ballad of Rusty Spurs.")

A few nights ago at 59th, after singing some Radiohead cover, a twenty-something girl approached me.

"Do you write original stuff?"

"Yeah, I do. Why do you ask?"

She produced a flyer from her bag. "Well, I'm doing a threater show right now, and I'd love to have you as our musician. We just need some haunting guitar music to serve as transitions and the like."

I was certainly flattered (she even offered to pay me), and politely "maybe'ed" the proposal. Could I really write 20 minutes' worth of music in less than a week for a threatre piece? Unlikely. But then again, I do tend toward the haunting side of things with a lot of my music, so there'd be a natural knack built in, and it'd be a good challenge for me anyway.

Then I woke up this morning and realized that neither of us had contacted the other.

"Scratches on their Forearms."

This message, hastily scribbled on a scap of parchment and delivered to my brownstone moments ago by a satchel-toting Nike of a lad, appears to be the latest of Mr Morrison's correspondences from the front. If you fancy yourself bold enough to scan these jots and floats of brainnotes, I shall by all means curtail every impulse to beg you to consider the consequences of such devious actions (not to mention the significant difficulty in trying to chew food despite the holes hewn through one's mandible by the namesake weapon of the laserbats) – in short, read away:

My friends.

Allow me to declare that which most of you have wished for many a moon: war upon Music Under New York, (or MUNY). For the few of you who aren't familiar with this insidious organization, allow me to explain. MUNY is an organization for which one must audition which purports to foster musical performance and appreciation in the New York subways. Once admitted, performers (for they can hardly be called buskers, as you will soon see) are given a banner to hang up behind them which emblazons their skills and origins (mine, for example, would read: "Rob Morrison, folk singer, guitarist and harmonica player. Mortal enemy of MUNY.") and a schedule that depicts specific times and places when and where a performer shall perform.

Okay, fair enough, you say. No, not quite, say I. These fine philistines can boot out any other busker from their pitch if said busker isn't fortunate enough to (or isn't wont to sell out) possess the sacred MUNY banner.

It's my opinion that to have a schedule, not to mention the "authority" to forcibly remove others in order to strictly adhere to this schedule, strikes me as extremely antithetical to the basic idea of busking. In my warpedly idealistic mind, busking is about performing music that is important to the busker, in a manner that makes it easily affordable to an audience, not to mention displaying a "DIY" aesthetic, through which music should be music, performance performance, and most importantly, performer performer. In other words, setting up organizations that dole out performance times for their members is a ridiculous, because these locations are not to be booked as if they were concert venues; they are subway stations. Not only that, but having to go through a booking company immediately begins to zap away the special aspects inherent in busking. Perhaps I am misguided: perhaps there are underground coalitions through which homeless persons schedule windows of time for appearances in desirable locations throughout Manhattan. But I suspect that this sort of organization does not exist, and if it did, an audition/interview process would certainly be required so as to sort through applicants and select the most respectable lot to be set up as members. Obviously, this goes against most commonly established notions of what it means to be homeless: if there are such institutions that would prove so organized and so thoroughly resigned to helping their homeless clients earn money, shouldn't such an institution simply become a shelter or a mission? That would provide true help.

The analogy is, of course, somewhat incongruent. Buskers, most of them anyway, do not typically require help in the form of bookings or money (though many find both in the subways). Nonetheless, MUNY seems expressly aimed at supplying both of these to their musicians.

In the past few months, I've had plenty of encounters with MUNY folks, most of them ending with my exit from the desired pitch. I can't say that this has exactly changed recently, although my last run-in was my most ballsy by far.

About a week ago, I arrived at the 59th St Station around 6:15 pm and set up as rapidly as I could. I hadn't even made it through my first song before my peripheral vision picked up a duo of asian musicians setting up behind me. It wasn't long before I caught a glimpse of the familiar gold and black MUNY banner. After a brief flicker of a temptation to pack up, I firmly resolved to completely ignore them and continue playing. One of the members of the duo walked up to me, and I avoided eye contact and persisted in strumming out any opportunity for him to engage in conversation, quickly going into my next song and my next song after that, not allowing any breaks in between. He ultimately came right up to me and asked me to go away, brandishing his schedule of righteousness as proof of his entitlement.

I wasn't satisfied, and blurted out frankly, "Look, buddy, anyone can perform here. That (the schedule) doesn't mean anything to me. If I don't do this, I'm not going to eat tonight, and since I was here first, you'd better find somewhere else."

The starvation claim was definitely an embellishment. But my feelings were sincere, and a good 20% of my income is derived from busking. He seemed rather flummoxed, and conferred with his duo member before then shuffling off to further confer with the police. Obviously, my protest had reached the pinnacle of its effectiveness (I doubt the police would have appreciated my points), and I scurried off amidst a fog of my own expletives.

Rest assured, my friends: this war has only just begun.

Rob Morrison

Well, Morrisonites, I daresay that this note hardly makes sense to most of you. Nevertheless, Mr Morrison seems to find some import in these matters, and will, I am sure, be greatly moved by your taking such matters to heart.

Godspeed.

Archaeopteryx T.C. Bustard

Bits of music.

All of my belongings have finally been relocated to my Manhattan apartment (which means I now have a spacious 2" x 2" area in which to sleep.

My turntable is broken.

On the sunny side, all of my records seem fine.

I hate X3. Oh, and...

So it's been a while since I've posted anything up here, mostly because I keep typing up entries, previewing them, then wantin to make a change but stupid freaking BLOGGER won't let me browse backward without wiping out everything that I just entered in. And it usually feels really retarded to retype an entire entry, though it may seem like a mere trifle. It also feels a little strange to force myself to write about every little quirky thing that happens to me in the dingy capillaries of the MTA, so I've been trying to hold off. But here's something cool.

A few weeks ago I was packing up after a few hours of playing. I descended to a lower platform to head home for the night, when I passed an asian man who was playing on a long-necked, three-stringed instrument that appeared to be fashioned from a turtle shell. With a surge, all my knowledge of Harry Partch and eastern, microtonal music flooded back to me and was converted -- miraculously -- into understanding and total enjoyment. I say that this was a miracle because, though I am fond of all music and certainly a proponent for its continued existence and creation, and am aware of its functions as well as the differences in its manifestations depending on the culture from which it originates -- despite all this, I am not a huge fan of eastern music. Well, not a big "listener" of it anyway. So transfixed was I, that, had Rachel McAdams approached me and professed her undying love for me after years of watching me from her celebrity hilltop, as well as her uncanny ability to land me the role of Carnage in Spider-Man 4, I seriously doubt I would have as much as blinked.

After he finished his smokey, wirey song, he looked up at me, and seemed to appreciate my attentive listening. Then he noticed my guitar, and gestured toward it ambiguously, animatedly speaking in its direction. I confess that I didn't really understand what it was about my guitar that he was commenting on, but something in his good-natured smile and curiousity-filled eyes led me to believe that he wanted to try his hand at playing my guitar. So, I opened up my case, and attempted to hand the symbol of contemporary western music to an eastern traditionalist. This was not, evidently, what he had in mind, and he began laughing beneficently (as did a few onlookers, though I doubt that any of them knew what that word meant), before implying that I would be welcome to try his lute-like instrument (an offer which I politely declined).

In the most tentative, language-barriered terms, we began to speak of music. He showed me how difficult it was to play his lute (because of his incredibly fast strumming method, he employed the use of a sharp, very stiff pick that he fastened to his thumb, much like the approach of some bluegrass musicians, I believe). When he saw my harp (my yoke was still hanging around my neck), he seemed genuinely interested in the notion of playing two instruments at once. I was very near attempting some sort of east-meets-west jam session when, as it is sometimes known to do, my train arrived, and our conversation came to an end.

I saw him a few days later, and he had no clue who I was.

But you break.

It occurs to me that I haven't blogged for the last seven or eight busking trips. This might lead some to suspect that I've given up the ghost, fled for the Catskills, or been pinned between a steel subway car and a concrete stubbly platform, my guts precariously prepped for bursting should anyone attempt to rescue me. But this is not the case.

I am merely scatterbrained. Plus, I didn't feel like anything of interest was happening. I mean, I'm sure that the one or two friends I have that read this blog LOVE to hear about me learning the lyrics to "Guantanamera," or my latest encounter with a group British high schoolers, but I can't pretend that anyone else experiences such passion when perusing these passages.

So, the last four weeks, abridged: A girl ran by me while I was playing and told me I'd done a great job at the Magnet Level One Showcase (the house fits like seventy people, so the chances of her seeing me in the subway are mighty slim), I went out with Cat again (our act is slowly materializing), I played for a three-year-old's birthday party after his mother saw me in the subway (great people), and I've been playing a cupboard full of Bob Dylan songs (latest obsession).

I've also decided that I fervently hate Music Under New York. Not familiar? They're a group of petty thieves, basically...it's a bunch of buskers that the city authorizes to perform at choice pitches, and endows with schedules that are so uncannily powerful they can drive non-MUNY buskers away from their precious locations. I've been booted more times than I can take, and the next time some freaking ethnic yuppie (I haven't seen a single causasian person, not to mention singer/songwriter type) brandishes a laminated schedule, there might be some fur flying. Of course I'm kidding.

I'm just gonna piss on 'em.

The Night of 1000 Oddities

Tonight was easily the strangest mix of events I've ever witnessed in one evening of busking.

I started out at 59th St (1 and 3 line), and got through about one song when I discovered that another busker had set up shop behind me. One of those "Music Under New York" fellows. (Sure I applied to be one too, but this guy is significantly less cool than I would be as a MUNY representative). This guy sings in a really obnoxious high-pitched voice and plucks some crazy African instrument with his thumbs...I used to think it was nifty, but now that he's got me all miffed, I'm gonna pull a human and be mad at him. I told him, "look, I know you're all official, but this is part of my livelihood, and since I was here first, you should probably go." He presented an official MUNY schedule, which apparently equals diplomatic immunity. I wish I coulda been like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon II, when he shoots that guy with diplomatic immunity anyway because he's just that cool. I didn't have a gun or an original film to make a sequel out of, so I let it go and migrated down to 34th St.

It's a bad pitch. There's no freaking room, there are four potential platforms to receive the noisy razor subway cars, and everyone looks pretty miserable. Nonetheless, I made decent money and had a pretty good time before I had to head out to see my friends' improv show at the Magnet.

Afterwards, I thought I'd scope out 59th St again. Sure enough, it was free, and I set up camp. I don't know what it was...maybe a full moon?...There were soooo many cute girls out tonight! One group spotted me after getting off their train, stuck around to hear me finish my song, and then asked if I took requests! I did my best...I really need to expand my repertoire. After they left, more cute girls replaced them...I'm not usually a completely girl-crazy type, but I couldn't help but notice them tonight. It was awkward of course...I mean, what am I going to say? "Hey, so yeah, I'm playing my guitar in the subway. Wanna get a drink sometime?" It doesn't really work. At any rate, they all seemed to like the stuff I was playing, and that's more than enough for me.

I had applause tonight! On a couple of occasions I've had one or two people applaud after a song, and I was flattered; not only because of their appreciation, but also of their willingness to applaud a busker, someone who the general public does not congratulate or admire in the least. But tonight, practically half the station applauded after three consecutive songs! I was truly flabbergasted.

Later on, one guy asked if I knew "Save Tonight" by Eagle Eye Cherry. While I like the song, I didn't really know how it went, but luckily he was able to tell me the chord progression. I spun through the chorus a couple times, but didn't know the lyrics to the verse. A crazy group of college-age kids came in a little later and formed a little pow-wow around me, swing dancing to the Oasis song I was playing. And not in a mocking way, which has happened before. They were all super nice, and seemed to get a kick out of me interacting with them so nonchalantly (at least as far as I'm concerned, everyone should feel free to talk to me...it's not like I'm onstage and can't acknowledge the audience).

To top it all of, as that group was leaving, a hispanic-looking gentleman with a guitar strapped to him trotted up to be and began strumming with me. Being completely down for a jam with a stranger, we tried tuning for a second, but he clearly wasn't into such specifics, and wanted to get going with a song. Before I knew it, he was playing "Guantanemera"...now, if you're one of the three people that know me in this city, you'll know that I'm obsessed with this song. If you aren't, you know now. I couldn't believe the coincidence. We had a fun time harmonizing for all of thirty seconds -- then the train came and he was gone (with a promise that he'd be back after making two laps on the subway...seeing as how that would have probably found him returning to 59th around 4:00 or something, I decided he wouldn't be too offended if I went home).

Interestingly enough, upon returning home, I discovered a myspace invitation to a Be-In. The invitation apparently came from someone who saw me at 34th St earlier tonight and remembered my myspace URL. Pretty cool...Be-Ins seem like they'd be a lot of fun.

After my first stint at 59th tonight, by G harp blew a reed, so I snagged a new one on my way to 34th St. Unfortunately, I couldn't really use it much since it hadn't been broken in yet (wailing on a new harp is sure-fire way to demolish it early on), and it just so happens to be in the key that I play in the most. So, I decided to transpose all my songs up a whole step into A tonight, to match my other harp (it would have been too much of a jump to make them into C, my third and final harp). I was worried that I may not be able to sing some of the songs up that high (sometimes G feels like it may be pushing it), but it actually fit into my voice even better...I guess I must have a vocal break somewhere around G, though I've not given it much thought before now. Having the songs up higher tonight also made my voice travel a little better I suppose, which could explain why I did so well...I'm not sure. I'm only sure of one thing:

I have no clue how to meet girls in this city.

Mbube

Sometimes a bed looks a little too hungry to be just a bed. Like maybe it's a monster or something, swallowing up the last few hours of a day that's inevitably spent doing required things for bosses and other spuds. Tonight was one of those times. I decided to avoid my monsterbed and hit the rails.

Busking is weird late at night. I got to 59th St around 11:15, and made about eight bucks all night (granted, I only stayed about an hour and a half). People don't seem as apt to receive entertainment at the tail end of the day. I'm not sure I blame them, but then again I wasn't prancing about warbling "Daydream Believer," so I don't know what they were so peeved about.

Saw V for Vendetta earlier tonight: completely saucesome. I'd heard a salvo of unpleasantries about the movie, but it just goes to show that you sometimes have to formulate your own opinion.

I was reading about this guy Solomon Linda today. He wrote "Mbube," which eventually became "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." I remember hearing the Tokens' version of it in elementary school and seeing Timon and Pumbaa jam out to it, and more recently enjoyed hearing Pete Seeger's impassioned live recording...but I didn't know it had its roots in Africa, where Linda wrote it as he actually protected his livestock from a lion. Turns out Linda got completely screwed over by the record label that purchased the song from him (a familiar story), and his family barely received any of the royalties once the song hit it big and appeared in films. Linda has long since passed away (he had only $22 in his bank account when he died), and a sizable chunk of his family has passed away also, some simply because they could not afford medical treatment. The remainder of the Lindas have worked in factories and mills to support themselves, until recently, when litigation has finally corrected the injustices of Disney and several record labels.

If that story isn't enough to piss off any sensible person, I don't know what is.

Thievery in the Land of Plenty

People do know "MTA (The Man Who Never Returned)"! Albeit, those who do represent about 1/1000th of the subway-going population, but still....that's one or two people everyday that are so totally on my side that I'm pretty sure I can count on them when the great war breaks out between me and the creepy violin player that hovered over my spot tonight in anticipation of inheriting it. (To catch you up, "MTA" is a comedic folk song the Kingston Trio and others have recorded that I've loved since days of kiddiness, but haven't found much success with in the busking world).

Busted out a new tune called "Woodgrain Love Song" tonight, and some little kids seemed to enjoy the feelgood, uptempo groove of it. Then again, I'm pretty white, so I'm not sure how much of a groove there is in any of my music. But it was a good time.

I love it when I thank someone for their donation, and they say, "no, thank you!" That's way nicer than most New Yorkers are often reckoned to be.

A man who looked like Albert Einstein combined with Doc Brown from Back to the Future scurried up to me tonight inbetween songs and asked, "do you like Bob Dylan?" I replied that I did, and he rapidly informed me that he's a composer who recently wrote a piece in which he distinctly heard Bob Dylan's "voice." I guess I understood what he meant, but I was so entertained by his peculiar energy that I wasn't trying very hard to do anything but watch him.

Also played the Beatles (George Harrison) song "Something" for the first time today, and it went over rather well. One guy even applauded!

Saving up for a concertina...wouldn't you like to know why?

It's the singers, not the songs.

I recently started taking improv class at the Magnet here in NYC. Improv's never really been my thing...I mean, I like it and all, but I used to go a little too crazy with it in high school, and several injuries have resulted...okay, not really. But suffice it to say that I need a lot of work. Anyway, class so far has been pretty swell, and I met a girl named Cat who expressed some interest in joining me for a busking expedition (plus, she's from NC like me, which is pretty radical).

I guess I wasn't sure what to expect from being a duo. We'd never sung together before (although I did hear her warming up the other day before improv class, and she's got some killer pipes. Aaaaaand her voice is good, too.), and I wasn't sure if we'd know any of the same songs, or what exactly the setup would be for our carousing and cavorting.

It actually went really well. Cat's voice is really versatile; she was able to do some Emmylou Harris-esque background vocals on a couple songs, we both looked over some belty Kelly Clarkson sheet music while playing (I was impressed...her songs aren't as bad as you might think), and Cat wrote out the chord progressions for a few other songs she knew as well. She's also a pro at transposing music apparently, which I was simultaneously impressed and intimidated by (I don't know a whole lot about music theory). But, all in all, we had an awesome time.

There's talk of more adventures like this one....so keep your eyes peeled! For just when you've let your guard down...the (UNNAMED DUO) shall smite you with batallions of musical spears and rhythmic howitzers! Rest while you can.

and the mome raths outgrabe...

The sun came out today. Noting the rarity of this phenomenon, I decided that more people than usual would be out and about, traveling to Central Park or whatnot, and that these conditions might make an ideal setting for a busker such as myself.

It's weird, but this is the first time since starting busking that I've actually needed the money. Before it was all about the music, the art, etc....now I just need cash! It's not like I'm at the end of my rope, but I'm trying to save up as much as I can right now so I can afford a place of my own for recording purposes (I sleep in my friends' living room right now).

"MTA" actually got some donations this time around (albeit, from older folks who seemed to have heard of the song). I also spotted someone who I believe to be a friend from NC, but she didn't respond when I called out her name. As a busker, I should've felt pretty confident about shouting out something like that, but for some reason it was pretty awkward. I guess I was trying to maintain some semblance of professionalism or something.

Around the time I was planning on terminating my session, a subway car pulled up, and as the doors opened right in front of me, my friend Christian popped out. "Deus ex machina!" we both cried, our voices ringing like so many Hershey Kiss Bells from that holiday commercial. He snapped a few photos of me on his digicam, and SWOOSH! We were off to make like Sheryl Crow's sellout song.

The Grover Cleveland of Busking

An erratic schedule has kept me from busking for two weeks, and in an effort to compensate for this, I occupied the Columbia University station for two, non-consecutive terms this evening.

Thinking that I may see some cute girls near Columbia, I was temporarily blinded to the fact that college students have no money. Thus, many a cutie was seen, and nary a dollar was made. Well, okay, a couple bucks. I mostly just need quarters for laundry at this point, or people really will think I'm homeless since I'll be busking in the same clothes tomorrow.

I learned tonight that just because I think a song is funny/great/super/touching/moving/whatever, doesn't necessarily mean that audience members (I think it's the first time I've called them that, but I think it's logical) will pay enough attention to figure that out. For example: recently, I really got into this song from my childhood called "MTA (The Man Who Never Returned," about a Bostonian who gets on the T without being aware of the fare increase, and cannot afford to get off the train. It's a ridiculous song, made all the better by its popularization by those swell fellas, The Kingston Trio. Anyway, I guess the song either references Boston too much, or people can recognize that it's a goofy song from a bygone era...either way, it got the least response of any song I've played yet! On the upside, I jammed out to it with my family in San Diego a couple weeks back...maybe I like it better that way. Yeah...it's a family thing.

One thing's for sure: people sure get weirder late at night.

Beasts of Bourbon

After ten or so days and six or so songs in California, I have returned to New York. The weather was disappointingly cold, but seeing friends and family was saucesome, and I'm pretty excited about a couple of the new songs that I have. Traveling out west gave me a sort of Manifest Destiny, Woody Guthrie sensation -- if that makes any sense -- and sparked some tunes in that style. We'll see what comes of them.

My first night back was weird...I think my head is still in California, eating sunbeams or something. I tried out two new songs, one of which is still going to take a lot of practice. I think people can sense when I'm playing a song that I feel isn't quite ready yet. I thought busking would be a good toolshed for shaping up new material, but sometimes I feel too awkward to try out the fresh ones. I dunno. Anyway, two guys were complimentary of my song "Emmylou" tonight, which dispelled some of my insecurities in performing that one. They wished me good night and good luck, like the great Edward R. Murrow.

I'm a big fan of kids asking their parents if they can have money to put in my guitar case...it's wonderful to see children enjoying music at an early age, as well as acknowledging the music maker!

Boston may be housing me once more, this time just for the weekend (my first time back since living in NYC...which hasn't really been that long), and I may test out the T for buskability (they require permits in Boston, but I've never had problems).

Indonesian Junk

Oasis song + group of teenage British girls = big moolah.

This I have learned. It would seem that I also learned that my horrible new haircut (it's so freaking short that I look as though I just tumbled out of a naked mole-rat's womb) and grotesque shave (the first barber shave I've ever had, and let's just say I'm not going to let it mate with any other painful shaves out there to make shave-babies) have brought on a deluge of donations because people probably think I'm a fifteen year-old kid. I'm cool with it. What I'm not cool with is how I forgot to bring my website sign today. Pretty unfortunate, since so many passersby were flocking to see the lumpy-faced, pre-adolescent busker.

I've had difficulty thinking lately because the Cheap Trick song "Surrender" has been lodged quite firmly in the intersection of my crucial neural pathways. I decided the best solution to this dilemma was to learn how to play the song in about a day and spout it off to the great underground ear of New York. I certainly had fun, but I'm not sure if people recognized the song. Am I crazy, or is that like the best freaking power-pop song ever? Sure, Badfinger's got some pretty sweet tunes. But "Surrender" is truly epic. I was just surprised that I didn't see more looks of acknowledgement tonight. Talk about "losers of the year"....

Still, I made record cash tonight. I was close to losing record cash, too. A huge bunch of black kids were eyeing my case full of money and pointing and laughing at me. Heh, real cool. I'm not trying to be racist...they just happened to be black, and they really seemed to be planning some kinda heist...or maybe I just got keyed up and my imagination filled in the rest. Regardless, I got pretty evil-eye on them, and started playing a little snarly; my appearance probably negated this, though. I swear that barber's gonna get a piece of my mind! And many pieces of my hair....

I've been having some problems with one song, "Where Marlborough Street Ends." Could be because when I wrote it, I quickly recorded it with a drum loop and now I can't play it exactly right since I can't hear the drum rhythms. I also wrote it when my ex-girlfriend and I were still dating, so maybe it's hard to play for that reason. At any rate, I think I'm going to give it a rest for a bit. I'm still polishing up my newest song, "Cold, Cold Columbia."

I'm actually heading to sunny California in a few short hours! It's high tme I see my grandparents and extended family out there, plus my bottles of sunshine are almost out here. Every time I go out to CA I have an amazing time and get pretty into my writing, so hopefully I'll have some swell stuff to update on when I return on the 23rd.

Until then, godspeed and gehsundheit.

Bond. Vagabond.

After creatively exhausting myself to the point of actually going to sleep before midnight last night (I think the last time that happened was 5th grade...must have been the one Friday night that TGIF was temporarily replaced by the news, sports, or "Beaches"), I think I've decided to not worry so much about this song I've been working on. I'm really happy with the lyrics, so who cares if the melody sounds like a Neil Young song? A tweak here, a tweak there...unrecognizable. I hope.

I got a guitar pick (canary yellow) from a guy at 59th Street yesterday. Musicians are definitely -- and logically -- the most generous, at least thus far. I got a five dollar bill from a guy who said he needed to help out his fellow guitarist, but he'd only been in the station about thirty seconds before hopping on the train! I was floored. I also met a very complimentary lady who really liked "The Fly," a song I wrote based on the William Blake poem of the same name. I usually don't play it because the finger-picking pattern is too soft amidst the torrents of underground New York, but I'm glad I did on this occasion. She wrote down my website address, and told me she's a performer, too: an aerial performer! Cirque du Soleil type of stuff, she told me. Wow. I can't even ride an escalator without tumbling into oblivion...doing anything more complicated is simply incomprehensible to me.

It's weird...everytime I start feeling groggy while busking, I'm able to convince myself "Just one more song," and I always end up getting a sizable amount of donations from that last song, or meet someone who has valuable insights into music, busking, performance, etc (or mybe part of my brain just searches for something meaningful to justify my procrastination). Last night I ran into my friend Caroline (the one who didn't really ditch me a few posts earlier)! She and I went to high school together back in NC, and haven't seen each other since. I wonder what would have happened if I continued on this "one more song" mentality...maybe met some Mole People?

Samhain's Revolver

The main highlight of today's busking expedition was my friend Christian trying to take some pictures of me at 50th St -- most of them didn't really come out so hot. Turns out that the visual flurry and musical splendor of a real, live Rob Morrison performance simply can't be captured on film. Ha, if only that were true. Oh well, back to the drawing board. Literally, since the photos are a no-go.

I only stayed out for about an hour and a half today...I was supposed to meet up with a friend from high school for coffee (she totally ditched on me...or maybe I was supposed to call her...), so I kept things short. I did see the same guy today who observed me quietly yesterday. I think that's probably the first time I've ever seen a passerby more than once.

Things were low-key at the office today, so I was able to spontaneously write some song lyrics. The trouble is that when I write lyrics first, they often take on someone else's melodies. Today I ganked a Neil Young tune from his new album, Prairie Wind. Whoops. I've also been noticing that I write way too many ballads and generally downtempo stuff, and since part of my goal in busking is to entertain the folks around me enough to get them to actually listen to what I'm playing, perhaps super-depressing tunes aren't my best bet, at least not a full brigade of them.

Milk and Honey

Life is all about calluses. If you're not willing to build them up either literally or figuratively when it comes to what you wanna get better at, chances are you'll stay pretty bad. Not 24-karat wisdom, to be sure. But true, I think.

I'm having an awkward time spinning the acting and songsmith plates simultaneously. Well, in truth, I haven't done much for my acting career since arriving in town. There are tons of excuses to be had, and none of them deceptively winning enough to show up here. Suffice it to say that way too much of my life has lately been sapped by unimportant projects (my job). Nevertheless, I came out of last week one song lighter (I guess I should say heavier...but when I write something new, I feel a lot more buoyant and a lot less cumbersome), and the show I was helping out with is -- thank the merciful heavens and even-more-merciful jars of tupelo honey that have imbued me with sufficient sugar rushes to charge, broken-axle and off-kilter, through this week --is done! Now I gotta get back to earnin' me some songwritin' and buskin' calluses.

Had one listener tonight who never said a word to me but made a nice donation and gave me multiple -- if somewhat grave -- thumbs-up. I wouldn't think to do that in a solemn way, but then again I didn't think to pay off my monthly college loan payment on time this month.

The new song (I even need a working title!) was a scrap of something I started writing two years ago, if I'm not mistaken. I hadn't forgotten about it, but I had forgotten a chunk of it after I came up with it, and in a sacred effort to summon the ghost of the missing chorus back to the realm of living music, I nobly left it my its lonesome for way too long. Now, sidestep for a second: I've been really into this artist Laura Veirs (I mentioned her a few posts back). I haven't really fallen headlong for an artist's stuff in a while, so being won over by her performance and music brought a much-needed sense of refreshment. More on her stuff another time. At any rate, I read an interview of hers regarding songwriting...she was never super into music in high school (can't say I shared that trait), but music of all manifestations -- including songwriting -- hit her towards the end of college. She's since become a champion of songwriting, insisting that "anyone can do it", and going so far as to teach private songwriting lessons in her hometown of Seattle. One of her pupils was an elderly German guy (if I recall correctly) who adamantly resisted the notion that he could write until Laura sat down with him and helped him string some chords and phrases together. Once he saw how easy it could be if he just allowed himself to toss the fear of failure (or success, as it may be) aside, he was overjoyed. But he soon descended into huddling over his lyric scraps, protecting his ideas...basically becoming one of those "classic cases" as Laura says.

I'm totally one of those guys, and I hate it. Songs don't need to be these malnourished tubors that I labor over for ages, providing just enough water to keep them alive but preventing them from growing. That's like fucking veal. And I hate veal. I'm not going to write veal!!!

Anyway, I finally finished that song. It's far from perfect (I fudged some lyrics today at 50th St), but until I really really really get in the habit of working on songs (I'm only up to one and half reallys), I shouldn't be expecting a smooth, polished shoe of a song. I'm fine with Chuck Taylors for now.

Brother, can you spare some time?

Yeesh. Just one busking outing this week. I thought I was getting quite an audience at one point because the trains stopped running for about forty minutes....and then my string broke. I thought I had a replacement, so I started fitting a new one in before realizing that I'd picked the wrong string. The proper G string (that just doesn't good) was waiting at home for me, so I packed up and called it a night. Not too eventful. I was kinda grumping around all day, and because office work's getting crazy and longer (I hate having to use that as an excuse), I didn't find a pitch until 8:00 or so. This weekend's not looking so good either...it's amazing how quickly I can get rusty.